Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

This is an unusual view I have not heard before. Could you link to a good article or study so I can learn more about the argument and data behind it?

View on HN

I remember watching an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit ages ago that railed against recycling. This seems to be it: https://vimeo.com/216389085

The core message of that video seems to be some libertarian wet dream, that it costs more money to recycle X than to build X from scratch, and that instead of government subsidies, we should just throw it all away in a landfill, until natural resources are depleted enough that we will be willing to pick up that trash for money.

Wet dream or not, my marginal billable hour is in the triple digits, as is my wife's. In my household, recycling is hugely expensive. There is no way it's cheaper for me to sort my garbage into piles of garbage, so that someone might be able to turn it into something usable. It's a huge tax on the populations where it's legally required, and worse, is no municipality even benefits from this tax.

Then employ someone to do it for you?

It is amazing people think it is worth spending 5 minutes washing out a jelly jar to save 1 cent in glass. I'll wash out cans and glass that clean in one rinsing, but even that is probably not an economical use of time.

Netflix must be expensive for you...

So how much cash did you burn by commenting four threads deep, halfway down the page on hackernews, Mr. Productive?

You make ("wet dream") Libertarians sound unreasonable, as if they want to ruin the world.

But it costs more for most of the things.

For example, for glass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890032

And an overview: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-...

>But it costs more for most of the things. For example, for glass:

You literally chose the worst material (recycling-wise) for your example.

Glass is made of molten sand -- the raw materials are cheap, and all the energy goes into melting it and forming it into the right shape.

Metal is energy-intensive and ecologically damaging to extract and refine[1][2][3], but shaping it from ingots/billets/blooms/slabs to finished product is a relatively small part of that footprint.

Paper is the same story, requiring a lot of "cooking" to break down wood into fibers (much more energy-intensive than re-pulping paper). And there's the footprint of paper forestry itself, which often uses herbicide to control weedy underbrush.

Plastics, similarly, are made of an energy-intensive raw material (it's solid oil essentially), but the process from pellets to finished product (typically injection molding) uses comparatively little energy.

Remember, recycling is near the bottom (least favorable options) of the waste hierarchy.[4] My philosophy? Reduce plastic, reuse glass, and recycle metal and paper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoil_tip

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy

> But it costs more for most of the things.

Which is exactly why it is subsidized. The goal is not to save companies money, but to save natural resources. Now, I agree it is debatable whether recycling achieves those goals, but a free-market approach, as introduced in the video, will only be more harmful.

> Which is exactly why it is subsidized

That could be spent on more natural resource conserving things. That's the argument.

In particular, it could be spent on "fighting" climate change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com